Dead Run

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Jackson had left fifty thousand dollars to Bertram Friday, “who has been a faithful friend over so many years.” “All the remainder of the property both real and personal, of which I may the possessed” was to establish a trust for “my nephew, James Worthington Jackson, son of my brother, the late Paul Jackson.” The First National Bank of Van Brunt was to act both as executor and trustee. So. Fifty thousand dollars to one Bertram Friday. A nice round sum, to Heimrich’s mind. And the rest, however carefully tied up, to his “devoted” nephew, who would get the income from the trust

  And what might that trust amount to? “Mmm.” Some people surveyed their monetary value from time to time. Had Sam Jackson? If so, where would he have filed a summary? Under “M” for money? It was not. Under “M” there was only a thick bundle of letters, held together by a rubber band. Heimrich slipped off the band and looked at the bottom letter. It was dated twelve years ago. It was headed, “The hospital.” It was hand-written. The writing was quavering, barely decipherable. The letter began, “Dearest love.”

  Heimrich confirmed what he already knew. The letter ended, “All my love, darling, Margaret.”

  He put it back in its place in the bundle of letters and snapped the rubber band around them. Some things are indeed private.

  Not under “M” for money, which had been a ridiculous notion to begin with. The summary of net worth, if Sam had ever made one, had not been under “W” for worth; it was not under “N” for net. “E” for estate? Sam would never had used so stately a word. Or would he? After all, he had been a lawyer. He had not. Where, then, if anywhere? Probably, of course, nowhere. Heimrich had never listed his own assets—not his tangible ones. The others were fixed in his mind, primarily under “S” for Susan.

  Heimrich stared down into the file cabinet. It seemed to stare back, as blankly. “P” for property? Seemed unlikely; turned out to be just that. “H” for—yes, by God, “H” for holdings. A large brown envelope with a sheet of white paper clipped to it. Written in pencil on the envelope: “Savings books, deeds, etc. Securities, custody Farthington, Brecht & Bernstein. (Steve Folsom.)”

  Heimrich sat down in Sam Jackson’s desk chair. (Alice Arnold’s eyebrows went up again at this sacrilege.) He spread the contents of the big brown envelope on the top of the desk.

  There were half a dozen savings bank certificates, issued by as many New York banks. All were for time deposits; all paid from 61/2 to 7 percent, compounded quarterly; one matured early in the coming January; the latest maturity date was four years in the future—almost four years. That account had been opened in the previous June when, presumably, Sam had thought he might have four years to live.

  None of the accounts showed a total deposit of over forty thousand, but all were near that sum. Of course, top level for insured deposits. Heimrich totaled the deposits on a sheet of paper he found in the center drawer. (Miss Arnold was going to exhaust her eyebrows.) The total came to $236,737.96. Well, James Worthington Jackson was going to be able to give up the shop which paid so inadequately.

  There were four deeds in the big envelope. One had yellowed with age. It transferred twenty acres, more or less, from one Hans van Fruylinghausen to Jacob Jackson, said land being situated in the Town of Van Brunt, Putnam County, New York. The transfer had been effective on the ninth day of April in the year of our Lord eighteen hundred and twenty-four. “To Jacob Jackson and his heirs and assignees forever.”

  The other three deeds were much more recent. Each assured Samuel Jackson (and his heirs and assignees) from twenty to thirty acres. The parcels adjoined one another. From the surveyor’s maps, the hundred-odd acres—115, more exactly, and, of course, more or less—lay in a strip along the highlands above the Hudson.

  Such land, Heimrich knew, was selling at around three thousand dollars an acre. The asking price sometimes reached five thousand. James Worthington Jackson wasn’t going to have to have any job at all. Almost two hundred and forty thousand in banks, duly insured by the federal government; three hundred thousand, more or less—perhaps a good deal more—in land, if the bank, as trustee, decided to liquidate assets. And in custody of brokers? Might as well try to clear things up as they went along. If the brokerage firm hadn’t shut up shop for the day. If Farthington, Brecht & Bernstein were in a cooperative mood. Or somebody named Steve Folsom happened to be. Which was very much an outside chance. Bankers and stockbrokers would no doubt talk only to each other—in whispers.

  “Happen to know anybody there, Charlie?” Heimrich asked, and showed Charles Forniss what Sam Jackson had written on the outside of the big envelope. It was an off-the-cuff inquiry, of course. But Charles Forniss has a habit of knowing somebody almost anywhere.

  “Nope,” Forniss said. “Can’t say I do, M. L. Farthington, Brecht and Bernstein. Nope. This Steve Folsom. Suppose he works there? Customers’ man or something. I did know a Folsom once. Lieutenant in my outfit for a while.”

  Forniss’s outfit had been the United States Marine Corps—Captain Charles Forniss, U.S.M.C.

  “Could be, M. L., his first name was Stephen. With a P-H. But it’s pretty vague. Long time ago, Korea was.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “A long time ago. And we’re still there. We’re still a lot of places, aren’t we? Backing the wrong guys, a good deal of the time, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Three fourths of the time, for my money,” Forniss said. “Come to think of it, it is my money. A couple of drops of it, anyway. Want me to try this Folsom guy? Old Marine buddy sort of thing. Probably the wrong Folsom, of course. Probably won’t remember me if it’s the right one. Value of Jackson’s stocks and bonds in their vaults?”

  “A rough figure will do, Charlie,” Heimrich said. “Happen to have this brokerage firm’s telephone number in your files, Miss Arnold?” He watched Miss Arnold’s eyebrows. He was not disappointed.

  She did have, in the card file in her office. But Mr. Jackson’s private affairs were—

  “A Manhattan telephone directory will do,” Heimrich told her.

  She said, “Bottom right-hand drawer, I think.” There was relief in her voice. Her active participation into this prying was not required. Anybody can make available a Manhattan telephone directory.

  Forniss found and dialed the number. He had to wait two or three minutes before he got “Farthington, Brecht and Bernstein good afternoon.” The voice he got was a little blurred. It was also a little indignant. It didn’t know if Mr. Folsom was available. All right, if it was that urgent, it would try to find out. “If you’ll just hold on.”

  He held on for what seemed a long time. Heimrich worked through another drawer of Samuel Jackson’s personal file. It was, so far as he could see, a waste of time. Well, detectives waste a lot of it. Part of the job. He did find under “E” a reel of 16mm film, in its original container. He left it where it was.

  “Office party, probably,” Forniss said. “He’ll probably be—oh, hello, Mr. Folsom. You happen to be Lieutenant Stephen Folsom, U.S.M.C.?—Yeah, I know. So am I. Captain Charles Forniss in the old days. A cop now.—Yes, I did say ‘cop,’ Steve.”

  He listened for several minutes; Folsom’s voice grated out of the receiver. Finally, Forniss said, “That would be swell, Steve. Only I don’t get into town much nowadays. Yes, Steve. State police.—Well, I’m lieutenant, BCI. All right, Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Thought maybe you could help us a little, Steve.”

  He told Stephen Folsom how he could help and, briefly, what with. He said, in answer to something Heimrich could not overhear, “But the man’s dead, Steve. Your firm will have to come through for the executors. Just trying to save a little time,” and listened again. Then he said, “All right, off the top of your head, then. Roughly. As of closing yesterday. How much did you say?”

  Forniss, who had been sitting in a client’s chair at an end of Jackson’s desk, reached a hand across it. Heimrich got a pad and a pencil out of the top desk drawer and put it in the waiting hand. Forniss wrote figures on
it. He said, “O.K., Steve. Thanks a lot. Get back to the party, fellow. Yeah, I sure as hell will.” He put the phone in its cradle.

  The right Folsom,” Forniss said. “And I’ll sure as hell look him up next time I’m in town. And the figures are just out of the top of his head, M. L.”

  The figures on the pad were $325,000-350,000.

  Not too far under a million, add it all up. More than that, if they could get five thousand an acre instead of three. Plus, of course, whatever Jackson had in a checking account. Or several checking accounts.

  James Worthington Jackson would be able to hire somebody to work for him—full time, if necessary.

  Chapter 9

  At The Corners, Forniss waited for the light to change and turned left into Elm Street, which had earlier been NY 109 and would be again before it dead-ended a quarter of a mile, most of it almost straight up, from the Hudson River. There were no longer any elm trees on Elm Street. Through most of the country, elm trees had died away on the streets named for them.

  The police car did not continue to the end of the narrow blacktop. After about a mile, Forniss turned right onto Van Brunt Pass, which was even narrower. There were pine trees on either side of Van Brunt Pass and they shaded it heavily. Ice still lay in patches on the pavement. If they stayed long enough on Van Brunt Pass—without skidding off it—they would be only a quarter of a mile or so from the Heimrich house, which was still known to most of Van Brunt residents as the “old Upton Place” (or the “old Upton barn”). Heimrich wished they were bound for it—for lights, if the power were really on, and warmth, with the same proviso, and perhaps a Christmas tree. It would be pleasant to have light. It was almost five in the afternoon and getting quite dark.

  “Right along here,” he told Lieutenant Forniss. “Sign’s behind a bush. There!”

  The sign, which was somewhat battered and almost hidden behind its bush, read “JACKSON.” Forniss turned the car left onto a narrow roadway, thinly graveled and somewhat rutted. It did not look like a driveway to a millionaire’s house. It looked like an almost abandoned farm road to nowhere in particular. It, like the pass, was heavily shaded. Like the pass, it had patches of ice on it. And as soon as they began to climb up it, they heard the tearing rasp of a chain saw somewhere ahead.

  It was slow going up the long, steep driveway, and it was somewhat precarious going. It was understandable why, the night before, Sam Jackson had elected to stay in the comfortable warmth of his office, with his Aladdin lamps glowing, and to have his dinner at the Old Stone Inn. The drive swerved sharply, and the car skidded a little. Forniss checked the skid.

  He was keeping his eyes sternly on the road, where they belonged. Heimrich could look around. So it was Heimrich who saw it and said, “Hold it, Charlie!” Charlie held it, although again it skidded to the sudden braking.

  “There,” Heimrich said, and pointed.

  He pointed at a pull-off, cut into a tangle of underbrush—the beginning, or the end, of a narrow, dirt road. An old farm road, Heimrich thought; possibly an old hay road. But not, at least not entirely, an abandoned road. A car had been driven into it recently, and the wheels had cracked through ice and here and there dug into mud. And the marks of tire chains were apparent in the newdug ruts.

  “Funny place to stash a car,” Heimrich said, and got out of the police car. And was thankful that he still was wearing the rib-soled country shoes. Somebody ought to invent shoe chains, he thought, and looked up the narrow dirt road, which was almost a dirt track.

  Here and there, rays from the low, western sun fought in among the trees. And, a hundred yards or so in, sunlight glittered brightly from something. The glitter moved and flashed as the trees swayed in the wind. Forniss was beside him by the time he saw the glitter.

  “Guess we’d better go have a look,” Heimrich said, and the two tall men plodded up the track, occasionally skidding on ice and in mud. The glitter grew closer. Then they could see the car which had left its tracks in ice and mud.

  Sunlight had reflected from the rear window of a big station wagon, with which the narrow road seemed to end. The station wagon was dark-colored—painted dark blue, as nearly as they could tell in the fading light. It was a Pontiac. It had no license plate. A big, abandoned Pontiac station wagon, stripped of its identity. Or was the word “hidden” more applicable? Not very well hidden, but a big station wagon is a little hard to hide.

  “Well, well,” Heimrich said. “Father Armstrong will be pleased, won’t he? Get the parish wagon back. Eventually, that is.” He tried to wedge himself in beside the abandoned wagon. There was not enough room between car and brush. Have to wait until Purvis had towed it out to see whether the parish station wagon had a scratch, with red paint embedded in it, on the right rear fender. A job for the lab boys, anyway.

  The chain saw, which had been resting, started up again as they got back into the police car. Forniss had stopped on ice, and the car wanted to stay where it was and spin its wheels. Forniss let it fall back a little to get its wheels on gravel. There was no trouble after that, except for the grade and the sharp turns and, of course, more patches of ice.

  “With all that money,” Forniss said, “you’d think he’d have got himself a decent—” he let the needless sentence die a decent death.

  They crept two or three hundred yards from the layoff before they came to a two-story white house—a house which, from the looks of it, had been standing there, high above the Hudson, for a couple of hundred years. It mildly needed painting.

  A tree had fallen on the wide graveled area in front of the house. It was a big tree. In falling from its weight of ice it had missed the house by not more than a dozen feet.

  A man with medium brown skin was standing by the tree, holding a chain saw. He wore a heavy windbreaker, almost a lumber jacket. The saw was resting on one of the limbs of the fallen treeprobably an ash, Heimrich thought—and the brown-skinned man had evidently been about to start it ripping through wood when, the car pulled up.

  He had already cut a considerable stack, fireplace length, of wood from the fallen tree. He laid the saw on top of the stack and turned to Heimrich and Forniss and said, “Good afternoon.” There was no trace of Southern accent in his speech. There was a hint of inquiry.

  He was a big man. Somewhere in his middle forties, Heimrich guessed. Two hundred pounds or so, and most of that bone and muscle. There was nothing especially Negroid about his face. At the moment, he was using the face to smile with. Heimrich said, “Mr. Friday?” and, in reply to a “Yes” and a nodding head, told him who they were. The smile went off of the brown face.

  “About Mr. Jackson,” Friday said. “Miss Arnold called and told me about it. A very bad thing, Inspector. A bad accident. Or—wasn’t it an accident? I mean, with a police inspector involved. And a state police lieutenant?”

  “We’re trying to find out,” Heimrich said, and Friday nodded his head again. “We wonder if you can help.”

  “If I can, I want to, Inspector. Mr. Jackson was a good man. I started sawing up this tree because he liked wood fires. Before I knew what had happened. Today—well, today I just went on sawing it for fires, although I guess now there won’t be any. He was a good man, Inspector.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “I knew him, Mr. Friday. He was a good man. A good man to work for, I’d imagine.”

  “Oh,” Friday said, “that too, Inspector. But I wasn’t thinking of that, mainly. Just that he was a good man. Just good. Not in any special way. It’s cold out here. You gentlemen like to come inside?”

  It was cold. With the winter sun near setting, with the northwest wind still blustering, it was growing very cold. Things will freeze hard tonight, Heimrich thought; down into the teens, probably. Perhaps even lower. And colder still tomorrow; a cold Christmas, if not a white one.

  Jackson led them into the house. It was warm in the house, although the wind rattled things, and made whining sounds at the windows. There was a fireplace in the square living room
Friday led them into, and big logs were burning comfortably in it. But the fire was not really needed; electricity had reached Sam Jackson’s old house. The ancestral Jackson house? Heimrich guessed it was.

  “Sit down by the fire,” Friday said. “Can I get you both something to drink?”

  He himself remained standing.

  “No, I don’t think so,” Heimrich said. “Sit down yourself, Mr. Friday.”

  Friday sat down; they all sat down—three big men in big chairs, in flickering firelight.

  “Any way I can I want to help,” Friday said. “You think it wasn’t an accident, Inspector? Miss Arnold told me it was. That somebody—somebody who wasn’t looking—backed a car into him at the inn. When he was going back to the office after dinner. It wasn’t that way?”

  “Pretty much that way, Mr. Friday. Only—whoever was driving the car may have been looking, we think. Looking very carefully. It was a big car, Mr. Friday. A big station wagon.”

  He watched Friday’s face when he mentioned the wagon. He could see no change on it; the expression remained grave and attentive. It was not the expression of a man who knew that a station wagon, which probably was also a murder weapon, was tucked away in bushes some three hundred yards from where they were sitting. It was the expression of a man who was listening to a sad but interesting story and wondering about it.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” Friday said. “Somebody deliberately waiting to kill Mr. Jackson. Not Mr. Jackson” His voice shook a little on the repeated name.

  “I’m sorry,” he went on. “You see, he was more than a man I worked for—had worked for for more than ten years. I—well, I thought of him as a friend.”

  “The way he thought of you, apparently,” Heimrich said. “What he called you in his will. ‘Friend.’ Did you know you were in his will, Mr. Friday?”

  “He never said I was. Not in so many words.”

  “But you’re not surprised?”

  “I ought to say I am, oughtn’t I? Sound better that way. But I can’t, Inspector. No, I’m not surprised. You’ve seen his will, Inspector?”